Guidelines for Phonetics (8)In this section you will learn about the major areas of phonetics and find out why they are so important as well as identify phonetics as an essential part of the subject of linguistics. This section will help you reveal the hidden secrets of phonetics that is as the great British scholar Henry Sweet said 'the indispensable foundation' for the study of the language whose view is as valid today as it was a hundred years ago. This article is concerned with the notions of sound, phoneme and allophone. What's the difference between the terms 'sound', 'phoneme' and 'allophone'? When we talk about the sounds of a language, the term 'sound' can be rather ambiguous because it can be interpreted in different ways. On the one hand, we can say that the sounds are different when they have different place of articulation (e.g: /t/ tree and /θ/ three), but at the same time we cannot say that when the sounds have the same place of articulation they are the same (e.g.: 'let me' and 'let them' ) because we can hear a vivid difference between /t/ pronunciation in the first case and /t/ pronunciation in the second case. That's why the linguists have introduced two separate termes to explain the notion of 'sound': phoneme and allophone.
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Guidelines for Phonetics
Organs of speech or the vocal organs are a set of organs (lungs, larynx, pharynx, nasal cavity, mouth (or oral) cavity, alveolar ridge, hard palate, velum or soft palate, uvula, vocal cords, tongue, lips, upper and lower jaws, teeth) used for the production of sounds through which people communicate (See Fig. 1).
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Guidelines for Phonetics
Checking for the basic understanding of the common notions of Phonetics 1. Is a letter and a sound signify the same notion? 2. Can a letter signify several sounds?
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Guidelines for Phonetics
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